March 12, 2020: ”Why has the nature of the book allowance changed?”

The book allowance was a wonderful feature of our program for many years. It was entirely funded by psychiatrists out of their own pockets. It does not come from any university or AFP or any other source of funding. Recently, as we have tried to put into place all kinds of extra supports for residents including longitudinal coaching (which is  Royal College requirement), as well as the Competence Committees and increased observation, we have been asking more of our partner hospital sites. In addition, some aspects of patient flow and billing have changed as a result of the LAE. Sites were expressing reservations about continuing to contribute their own money to a resident book fund in the context of all these other accreditation/programmatic/curricular changes.

There was real risk that the book fund was going to disappear completely. Please note that book funds are not mandatory and not an accreditation standard but one of the many ways we have been delighted to voluntarily support residents. Rather than completely eliminating the book fund, we were able to negotiate with the psychiatrists in chiefs for them to take 75% of the book allowance money and reallocate it directly back into education. They continue to contribute the remaining 25% directly to residents, but, appropriately insisted that there be some kind of adjudication process for receiving the funds. We struck a joint committee between several residents and psychiatrists in chiefs to determine the terms of reference. In the end, we were delighted to offer academic awards which previously did not exist. Every year we receive requests for funding for conferences, seminars or research and we had no ability to fund those requests. Although it would have been nice to continue to have staff psychiatrists give money to residents - in a time of university, provincial, and OHIP cutbacks, which also coincides with the increased educational infrastructure it just was not possible. We are very happy to have preserved some funds to support the scholarly development of our learners. We have enough money to ensure that every single learner who has a viable application will receive a "resident scholarly development award" at least once over the course of their training.